The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

Much as "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" was my most anticipated film of 2012, so was "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" my most anticipated film of 2013. While the first film was plagued by some substantial pacing issues and overindulgence of stuff that really should have been saved for the inevitable directors cut, I found it to be a fun ride that managed to open the floodgates to memories from my childhood. The second entry was set to absolutely blow the roof off the theater, promising some of the more memorable sequences from the book and introducing the greatest dragon in fantasy literature. Needless to say I was stoked beyond words.

Perhaps too much so, in all honesty. After a year of waiting impatiently, the film is now finally out, and I can't help but feel conflicted over my thoughts on it. Much like the first film, I can't say with a straight face that "The Desolation of Smaug" is a great movie. It suffers from the same problem that the first one had, which is that it's too damn long for no good reason, being padded out by the stuff from the appendices that was not in the original book, which slows the pace down like a drag-chute on occasion.

On the other hand, it's "The Hobbit," so I was still entertained. And to be fair, this is a much faster-paced, rousing, action-packed film that manages to be quite thrilling on more than a number of occasions, and the things that they do right is done very, very, very well. There are moments that are straight up sublime in how accurately they convey the wonderment and adventure from the book. The nerd in me had a very good time, particularly in the first half which follows Bilbo and the dwarfs through Mirkwood, providing the best action in the movie. What can I say? I'm a mark for this crap.

I was singing "The Greatest Adventure" in my head SO HARD at this.

It was when the group reaches Laketown and then Erebor itself that I found myself getting slightly off-put by some things which were not as present in the first film, those being the liberties taken with the story and characters. Some of them are worse than others. Now are any of them enough to make me say that the movie is bad? No, but as a die-hard fan since I was a child, I feel within my rights to objectively and calmly say that I don't think these changes were for the better, they are ultimately pointless, and they reek of studio interference, which I would like to believe that Peter Jackson would be above by this point.

"The Desolation of Smaug" follows Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and company through the forests of Mirkwood and the spiders, escaping the Wood Elves and Legolas (Orlando Bloom), down the river to Laketown, reaching The Lonely Mountain and confronting Smaug himself before ending with a cliffhanger that will no doubt be horrendously frustrating for anybody who hasn't read the book. Throughout the affair they are being chased by Azog and his orcs, who show up every once in a while to inject action scenes where there were none previously. That works I suppose, and does tend to heighten the sense of urgency, but it still smacks slightly of superfluous.

He's kind of the Gilgamesh to the Necromancer's Exdeath.

New additions to the cast include Bard (Luke Evans), a man of Laketown who doesn't seem nearly as badass as he should considering what he manages to accomplish later, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a wood elf who actually does manage to be a total badass when she's not stuck in a non-canonical and shockingly out-of-place love triangle between her, Legolas and the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner). While I'm not a huge fan of Evangeline I do think she does a great job here, and is one of the more hardcore characters, which makes it a shame that they thought that they needed to subject her to a cliched and meaningless romantic angle. Luke Evans on the other was just acceptable. He was kind of bland, he didn't really sell me on the character of Bard, and he looks way too much like Orlando Bloom. At first I legitimately thought they put a different wig on Bloom and cast him twice. In fact, the exact same thing happened to me and "The Three Musketeers," which also stared him and Evans. They really need to stop casting them together. It's distracting.

But we're all here to see a dragon, right? And true to my hopes and expectations, once he rises from his massive pile of gold, Smaug did not disappoint. He is sufficiently awesome and scary looking, and Benedict Cumberbatch provides a deep, mountainous rumble of a voice that conveys his power and savagery. I still prefer Richard Boone's portrayal in the animated version, but Cumberbatch is arguably the highlight of the film, as he is in roughly everything that he's in. And while the pacing is different than the source material, much like Gollum and Bilbo's scene in the first film, the famous conversation between Smaug and Bilbo is just as awesome as I was hoping it was going to be. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch play so well off of each other that its difficult to imagine anyone else doing it.

The issue I had with Smaug wasn't his portrayal, although he is oddly unobservant on a number of occasions, but the situation that they put him in. Not content with keeping the encounter with the dragon a game of wits and hiding between him and Bilbo, the film unexpectedly pauses the scene about two sentences before it would have normally ended, and decides to inject Thorin and the dwarfs into the situation. This leads to an extended action sequence that finds the dwarfs running around Erebor trying to defeat Smaug in a Boss Battle straight out of a video game. The problem is that literally nothing is accomplished by it. After it's done, Smaug simply picks up the conversation he was having with Bilbo half an hour previously, finishes the thought he had been having, and then flies away. And absolutely nothing had changed. It was as if our regularly scheduled program had been interrupted to bring us an unrelated action scene seconds before it was over.

"Hey. HEY. I'm way too good looking to not get an extended action sequence where I stand on a dragon's head."

I wouldn't have as big a problem with it had the scene accomplished something. But by its very nature it HAS to be pointless because the dwarfs don't defeat Smaug. The dragon flies away to attack Laketown, and there's nothing the movie can do about that. Nothing the dwarfs do there can amount to anything. So why even have them there? Was the movie not long enough? Maybe they wanted to end on a bang, but I tell you what, maybe instead of closing the film with a half hour long fight which is completely meaningless, you could have used that half hour to instead stick an action sequence that actually was in the book in there, and ended the film with Smaug attacking the city. And hey presto, the film would have actually had something close to an ending, too. I can see why they did what they did, but I really don't see the point.

I also feel it necessary to point out that despite the heroics of Thorin and company during the fight with Smaug, in the end, their plan was completely stupid. I'm no Tolkien scholar, and I don't know everything about dragons in that universe, but I am a fairly big nerd. And being a big nerd I must point out that if one desires to kill a dragon - an ancient fire-breathing red dragon - perhaps a strategy involving massive heat is not the way to go. I'm just saying that if your plan to kill a red dragon involves using its own fire to heat something else up which you will then use to attack it, therefore by extension ensuring that at absolute most, the fire will be no hotter than what its own body naturally produces, you have no idea how dragons work and have no business fighting them. And what do you know? We go through half an hour setting up this elaborate scheme, and in the end it does nothing except to mildly irritate Smaug before he walks it off and leaves, which makes less sense now because after all that B.S. they just put him through he'd probably stick around and eat all of them out of pure annoyance.

And maybe I'm being nitpicky...but why in the name of Gandalf's beard does Bilbo take off the ring while talking to Smaug? THAT. MAKES. NO. SENSE.

All that aside, there's still enough to call this a fun time. It's definitely got some fantastic action in it, which really saves it from many of its problems, but I am getting a little irritated at the persistent unnecessary padding this trilogy seems hard-set on subjecting us to. I'm sure we're going to get more of that come next December, as well. But "The Hobbit" is still "The Hobbit," and I can't help but be entertained. I just can't believe that my vision for the extended cut is actually shorter. Who would have thought?

OH MY GOD THIS TRAILER.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Desolation of Smaug" is better than "An Unexpected Journey" due to rampant action, a much faster pace, and Smaug The Most Terrible of Calamities. However, it's still too long and there are some weird additions that annoy and some pointless action that is shockingly distracting, at least to me. It's mostly nerdy nit-picking, to be fair, but it's enough to make me feel ever so slightly let down. But it'll probably get better with rewatching, and it's still Tolkien. I'd still rather watch "The Hobbit" cartoon any day, though.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

The 2009 "Star Trek" was one of the best films I saw that year. While some geeks bemoaned the alternate timeline Get Out of Jail Free Card, I thought it was a brilliant maneuver which freed it from the albatross of continuity that hangs from the neck of every film in the series before it. And under the efficient yet overly lens-flare zealous direction of newly appointed "Nerd Savior" J.J. Abrams and the amazing acting from the spooky-good cast, the 2009 "Star Trek" was to be quite honest, the best of the series since "The Wrath of Khan."

Naturally expectations were sky high for the followup. Personally I had "Star Trek Into Darkness" pegged as my second most anticipated film of the year, bested only by "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug." The mystery surrounding the plot and the enigmatic villain only served to amp up the anticipation, as Abrams as per usual wouldn't tell us anything outside of vague hints in the trailers. Like I'm guessing was the case with a lot of people, I was losing my mind over it. I needed to see this damn movie.

It must be a sadly amusing thing to watch a nerd freak out over a movie. I wouldn't know. I'd be on the inside looking out. I'd probably sympathize.

It's such a special feeling to have all those hopes and expectations you had been carrying for so long be thoroughly met and even, on occasion, exceeded. I was expecting "Star Trek Into Darkness" to be good on the mere fact that the last one was. I had no idea that is was going to be like this.

This movie blew my damn mind.

Still not sure if I like the "football jersey" uniforms, though.

Once again, as with the 2009 film, "Star Trek Into Darkness" is a sleek, surprisingly humorous and tightly wound action flick that pays homage to the source material while putting its own very distinct stamp on it. There's no way you'd mistake either of these films for the Shatner or even Stewart series besides the fact that they all feature a starship with NCC-1701 stenciled on the hood. The J.J. Abrams series is more like those films if they were one of the bonus levels from "Sonic The Hedgehog 2" cranked up on 5-Hour Energy Drinks and blasting Van Halen. But at the same time the reboot has a clear love and deep respect for the source material, and constantly goes out of its way to pay homage to it and reference it whenever it can. And the best part is you don't even have to be a Trekkie to "get it."

With "Star Trek Into Darkness" however, this was like a whole new beast. This isn't a journey of exploration nor a character study nor a turn-off-your-brain explosion fest. This is a dark, violent, dangerous roller coaster ride which sends you plummeting from orbit. And it's sending you flying at such high speeds and severe turns that the G-force is enough to liquefy your skull as it sends you hurdling through the Earth's core. While you're on fire. And blasting Van Halen.

From the opening scene where Spock enters an erupting volcano, "Star Trek Into Darkness" hits the ground running and never stops. Ever. The closest it comes to down time is right after that when Kirk gets predictably reamed out by Admiral Pike for being a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules, and Kirk reams out Spock because he can't physically not play by the rules, even when people's lives are in danger. Even in the quiet parts people are yelling. And then a building kind of explodes and that's the end of that. From then on it's non-stop intensity. Full power to the warp core, indeed.

Ah yes. The rare "Inward-Facing Double Coconut Crush" maneuver. Brian Adams would be impressed. #oldschoolwrestingjoke #sorry

The story this time involves a mysterious man named John Harrison, who is doing a very good job of blowing up a whole bunch of Starfleet stuff and killing a lot of people. A LOT of people. (The collateral damage numbers in this film are staggering) Once the situation goes beyond personal for Kirk, he sets out to find Harrison and take him out. But as we could tell by the trailer, there is far more to Harrison than meets the eye, and finding himself quickly outclassed and outgunned, Kirk finds himself in a situation where the fate of his crew and everyone he cares about is in dire straights. And the mystery of who this man is serves as one of the most thrilling reveals I've seen in a film in a long time.

I'm going to once again give every single last bit of praise that I can possibly heap onto the cast. As far as the main cast goes, they get all of it. All of my praise. There is not any among them that doesn't capture the spirit of the original actor, almost like it was the younger version of themselves on screen.

Chris Pine has the swagger and bravado and even some of the same mannerisms and facial ticks that William Shatner brought James T. Kirk to life with, but at the same time he does his own thing with it. This is particularly true with his vocal pacing and inflections, which are thankfully nowhere near the Shatnerian method of acting. But every once in a while he slips a halting, oddly intonated line in there in clear tribute. But Pine brings something that Shatner (as much as I am a fan of his) wasn't really able to do, which was to give Kirk a real sense of vulnerability. Here, Kirk is a man who has been successful mostly due to his freakishly good luck and good instincts. But that has made him reckless and overly confident - something which is about to cost him and his crew dearly.

"Oh. Hi."

This movie finds Kirk at the nadir of his lowest despair and the height of his greatest heroics, and Pine sells it with every word out of his mouth and expression on his face. I got more emotional resonance from Chris Pine in this than I ever did from Shatner, which isn't a slam on Shatner because this is a different kind of movie than he was in, but it made Kirk seem like more of a human being rather than the larger-than-life, nearly mythical figure that he was back in the original series or films. That's not to say he wasn't fully fleshed out as a character back then, but he was just as much a "real person" as Bruce Campbell is when he stars in something. You don't watch it for the subtle nuances of his acting, you watch it because it's Bruce Campbell and he's freaking awesome.

Zachary Quinto threatens to steal to show as Spock, once again capturing Nemoy's signature performance to an eerie degree. And if Kirk shows a huge range of emotions and states of mind in this film, it's Spock's journey here that is arguably even more significant, as we get deeper insight as to the nature of his Vulcan way of thinking, and how he functions as a man who has chosen to ignore fear or pain. But when it comes time for that resolve to be severely tested Quinto, like Pine, is more of a firebrand than Shatner or Nemoy portrayed, and because of that tends to convey emotion more effectively when he does fly off the handle after being annoyingly composed for so long.

Pretty much everyone else is a superstar. Karl Urban IS DeForest Kelley. There's no way around it. His version of Bones is the most accurate of all the cast, and he freaks me out. He's also given some of the best dialogue in the film, including the funniest lines and most foreboding. I was very happy to see Simon Pegg's Scotty get a more significant role in this movie than the previous one, as he is another one of my favorite actors, and likewise does a spot-on James Doohan. Zoe Saldana's Uhura is a bit too aggressively in-your-face than I'd like, as it's not much like Nichelle Nichols, but it's a fine version of that character. Meanwhile Anton Yelchin and John Cho as Chekov and Sulu are fantastic but a bit underused for my liking. But then again, "Star Trek Into Darkness" is, like all the rest, a movie about Kirk and Spock. We can't blame priorities on screen time, and everyone does get their moments to shine, short as some of theirs might unfortunately be.

What the crap is Uhura looking at?

The only person I didn't like was Alice Eve. She's a terrible actress. Just wretched. I've hated her in everything I've seen her in, and here was no different. I was pissed when I found out she was in this, and I was proven right to be mad. She's wooden, she speaks like she's reading cue cards, and can't seem to figure out if her character is a calm, cool, collected hard-ass or ready for a nap. I guess the way to portray "strong female characters" is to act bored and speak in a deadpan monotone. Even in a scene where she's pleading for her life and the lives of everyone on the Enterprise she delivers her lines about as forceful and intense as someone ordering from a Taco Bell drive-thru.

Ugh. Just go away.

But what of Benedict Cumberbatch? What of the villain? That would involve spoilers. Horrendous, unforgivable, ruinous spoilers, and I'm not going to do that to anyone, and I would advise that anyone who hasn't seen it yet to not even look up this film on IMDB or its equivalent before seeing it, because spoilers are already hard-coded into the page. Just go into it blind, as it was meant to be seen. But suffice it to say that Cumberbatch is incredible. Unbelievable. Someone needs to cast him as every villain ever after this film, because he's seriously like the next Alan Rickman, or perhaps a better analogy would be Jeremy Irons crossed with Christopher Lee and a dash of Ralph Fiennes. And you need to see him in this.

If he's not the next Bond villain, I quit life. Seriously. I'm checking out.

The only issue I take with this movie is roughly the last 3 minutes. Everything before that is golden, but at the very end it pulls the rip chord on a fight scene which is so intense and heart-pounding that I don't think I blinked for 15 minutes. Then PUNCH - cut to black - two weeks later - then one year later - some words are said - credits. Done. It's almost like the movie heard his parents coming up the stairs while he was in his room smoking so he had to stamp the cigarette out quick, sit on it, spray half a can of FeBreze and throw the ashtray out the window like "WHOOPS NOPE NOTHING TO SEE HERE. WE'RE DONE. MOVE ALONG."

Additionally I must nitpick that the traditional "Space...the final frontier" speech isn't very well handled. It's kind of crammed in there nonsensically, and the way they do it implies that it's actually the oath that Starfleet captains take when they assume command. This would also imply that every ship in Starfleet is called "Enterprise" and is on a 5-year mission to boldly split infinitives. There's also a problem with Kirk not getting any closure on dealing with the fact that he loses a LOT of people on this trip out. It's never even brought up, which wouldn't be such a huge deal except that at the beginning of the movie Kirk makes it a big point that he's never lost a single crew member. Well, that's changes, and it should have been a very emotional scene and a bit of character development which ties into the themes of hard choices and loss throughout the whole film, but since the movie just decides to slam on the breaks we never get that.

But whatever. That's the last 3 minutes. That's 2% of the run time of this movie. And while those things are annoying, everything else is - simply put - one of the best action movies I've seen since...well...2009's "Star Trek." And you need to see it. NOW.

Oh god this trailer. I have all the excitement.

THE BOTTOM LINE - I have not been this pumped up and pleased by any other film this year. It's the best action movie of 2013 so far, hands down, and it's just as good (if not in some ways better) than the 2009 film. It's in the top 3 best "Star Trek" films, and I honestly really want to see it again. Like, I wish I was watching it again instead of typing this. Guaranteed in the Top 10 of 2013, probably near the top. Unreal.

War Horse (2011)

I think my feelings on Spielberg have reached the point of full-out dislike. In the last 10 years, he's only made a single film that I've enjoyed: "Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull." And I'm not going to say that was necessarily a "good" movie since, make no mistake, it was hands down the weakest of the series, but it wasn't bad. I enjoyed it. But even though I liked it, almost nobody else did. Can't say that I'm not a rebel.

In fact, you could move that time table back another 5 to make it 15 years and it would only add one more film to the list: "Saving Private Ryan." Only a pair of decent films in a decade and a half is not a good track record. Anyway, the whole point I'm trying to make here is that it used to be that Spielberg coming out with a new movie used to be cause to get pumped. Now I just roll my eyes and groan because I know that eventually I'm going to have to force myself to sit down and be bored for 2 and a half hours. But I have to watch, right? It's Spielberg.

"Thank you. We enjoy Spielberg."

"War Horse" just irritated me. I think I could just leave it at that. It was irritating. And the biggest reason I found for the irritation was the fact that it was about a character that I felt nothing about. The horse is supposed to lead us through this journey which connects people across countries and war, but it just comes off as exceedingly forced, because nothing in the story comes across as natural. Now, some of this may be because of the fact that the acting in this movie is unbearably awful from all the humans involved, but another aspect is that IT'S A HORSE! Why is everyone totally enraptured with it?

What I never understood about the horse was that every single person who gazed upon it was immediately and inescapably entranced by it. People went slack-jawed every time they met him, staring blankly as they slowly reached up and stroked its mane like it was some siren or telepathic super-being. And it's to the point where they are willing to put their livelihoods and in some cases even their lives in danger, just so they can have the horse. And I never had any idea why, but I finally reached a conclusion. I know what the horse's deal is:

It's an X-Man. Or X-Horse I guess. My theory is that it's like Professor X and can control minds for its own diabolical reasons.

He gets this look every single time he sees that horse, despite having owned him for years. Dude, just have sex with it already. It's so obvious you want to. Just bite down and do it.

It's amazing the things people will do in this movie, just for a freaking horse. I know that plenty people have a thing for horses, but it really gets ridiculous. They spend their life savings to buy him when they didn't even need him (TWO people do this, actually). They rush into a firefight to save him. They disobey direct orders from their commanders, possibly risking prison or execution because they can't stand the thought of the horse not making it. Not only that, but people who are constantly SURROUNDED by horses look at this horse like it is Zeus come down from Mount Olympus and wearing a saddle while John Williams swells his hackneyed score over top of the proceedings.

And every single person who ends up in the possession of this horse, and there's a few, seem to have a clinical need to say "You can't!" after every single freaking occasion where any prudent person does something NOT in accordance with the horse's best interests. It gets really, really old and just winds up sounding really whiny. And in the end, it really does end up sounding like they're brainwashed. But at the same time, it does make it pretty funny to watch from the perspective of them being controlled by a telepathic Mr. Ed.

And I just had to keep coming back to the same question: Why?

IT'S. A. HORSE.

Oh right. It's touching. Whatever.

There was only a single scene in the entire film which worked for me. It involved a British soldier going out into Dead Man's Land to free the horse after it got tangled up in barbed wire. In doing so, he is almost certainly at a 90% chance of being shot. (::eye roll:: "WHY?") After by complete luck nobody shoots him, a German solider comes out of the trench to help him cut the horse free. It's a good, touching scene about two people separated by war who might otherwise have been friends. And the only reason this scene works is because the conversation doesn't revolve around them fawning over the damn horse, like every other conversation in the movie does. The conversation is about "How are we going to work together to accomplish this?"

That is, until they cut him loose, the horse stands up, they fawn over its majesty and start arguing over who should get it. Great. I guess the horse's mind control doesn't work when the horse is lying down.

So basically the story ends up being about a magical horse. The horse is magical. Everyone loves it, and it touches the lives of everyone it meets. And it doesn't matter that it takes place during WWI, when millions of people are dying all around. At least the horse is OK. What a crock of cheesy crap. And I'll say the same thing about "War Horse" that I said about "Hugo" and "Tintin":

If they hadn't been directed by really famous directors, these would have been laughed off the screen and forgotten in a week. Hey Spielberg, make a good movie again or just shut the hell up.

If I want magic horses, I'll watch this, thank you very much.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "War Horse" was dumb, cheesy and waaaaay too long. Spielberg has now officially made my "Who Cares" list. Skip it.